Electronic commerce (e-commerce) is growing in popularity with increased use of the Internet and the world wide web. While some web sites just provide information over the web and then rely on telephone calls for placing orders or buying products and services, many other companies, including booksellers and mutual fund companies, allow purchases to be made and other commerce to be transacted over the web. These companies typically have a web server with back end processing software and a database with information that can be provided over the web, including product information and ordering forms. These sites are typically designed to generate dynamic content that is personalized and secure for self-service. If a user is having a problem working with a form on the web site or finding relevant information, the user may be able to call a call center to ask about the problem and describe what he or she sees.
A prior method for collaboration, in which content can be shared over the Internet between a user and an agent, is described in patent publication WO 97/42728, which is expressly incorporated herein by reference.
Dynamic content is content that requires some processing to typically add or select information that is customized or unique to the user in some way. For example, a user who is already known to the web site could be served with a form in which a name, address, and credit card number are filled in at the web site, in advance, for the convenience of the purchaser. Other examples include pages in which content is based on information provided by the user, such as mapping information that obtains from the user an initial position and a destination and performs calculations that determine the directions.
When more than one participant to a collaboration session wish to collaborate with respect to a page that has dynamic content, it is desirable that each user see the same dynamically generated content. However, it would not be desirable for each participant to have the same processing performed repeatedly, because such duplication would create additional overhead and potentially duplicate audit trails and even business transactions. Furthermore, it is very desirable to restrict access to the shared session to collaboration participants, protecting shared content from unauthorized access from the Internet.
The present invention includes systems and methods for collaborating over the Internet (or an intranet) in which two or more participants, such as one or more users and an agent, can share dynamic content generated by a web site server. The invention facilitates collaboration on real, active forms and dynamic pages without the need to impose a proxy server between user browsers and web servers. The invention also includes mechanisms to facilitate content capture, to prevent multiple submissions, to selectively filter content from either the agent or user views, and to limit collaborative access to collaboration participants.
The invention includes a copy server that can store dynamic content after it is generated by the web site in such a way that the content can be provided repeatedly to two or more participants to a collaboration session without interacting with a web content server, application server, or database. The use of the copy server thus eliminates additional overhead of producing identical dynamic pages for multiple participants, and in some applications will eliminate redundant database entries associated with the production of a dynamic page, such as form submissions and audit trails.
The copy server is different from a proxy server, in that, unlike proxied pages, the copied page in the copy server has live links and active buttons that direct all of the participants browsers back to the original web site rather than to the copy server.
The participants collaborate through a collaboration server, as described in the incorporated document. The content in the copy server can be protected and thus can be made secure such that only authorized participants to a collaboration session are permitted to collaborate using the shared content in the copy server. To accomplish this, the collaboration server communicates with the copy server to identify to the copy server the authorized participants to the collaboration session so that the copy server can restrict access to the content in the copy server.
The copy server can also present different pages to different participants using filters. Such different participants will typically be grouped by role, e.g., as an agent or as a user. The filter, copy server, and collaboration server work together to allow a user and an agent to have the same view of dynamic content where needed, and filter information from one or more different types of views so that one participant may not see everything that another participant does. Such filtering can be controlled, for example, such that the agent sees only what the agent needs, while excluding other content. One use for filtering is to remove a xe2x80x9csubmitxe2x80x9d button from an order form to permit the agent and the user from both submitting the form on behalf of the user.
The present invention also includes components to capture dynamic content and store that content in the copy server. These components are called adapters because they are specific for different types of e-commerce platforms, making the copy server easier to use. In other words, they xe2x80x9cadaptxe2x80x9d the copy server to different e-commerce environments.
Another feature of the adapters (or appropriate custom code) is the ability to synchronize access to a page to prevent race conditions between multiple participants and to avoid redundant operations. Once identical copies of a page are loaded into multiple participant browsers, a race condition may be created if more than one participant operates on the page and then submits that page to the web server. The adapter only allows one participant to operate on the page through the adapter; subsequent operations are blocked. When a result page is generated from the operation in response to the participant who submitted the page, that resulting page is copied into the copy server and thus becomes the copied page for access by each participant.